On the Argentine
side, things were not quite so efficient, to say the least. The Argentine border
post (pictured below) is larger but dingy and, though there were two
immigration officials at a tiny window, the line – such as it was – never seemed
to move. When I finally reached the front, I reminded the young woman there
that the receipt for my so-called
“reciprocity fee” was in my previous passport, which I also provided her,
but that appears to continue to confuse Argentine immigration everywhere except
for the international airport at
Ezeiza, where I originally paid it.

Perhaps that’s
because it’s no longer possible to pay on the spot as I did in March of 2010,
eight months before that passport expired. The fee is valid for ten years from
the time of payment, but at
present it’s only possible to pay online, and arriving Australian, Canadian
and US visitors must show a printout of their payment.

I might guess
that this young woman is a newer employee who might never have seen a receipt
like mine (pictured above), but that didn’t explain the half-hour or more that
it took for her to examine every page in my passports – including two trips for
apparent back-room consultations and a request to wait alongside the window
while she attended another customer – but I eventually got the stamp that admitted
me to Argentina. This should be the last time until I fly from California to Buenos Aires in mid-April.

After that, and
refilling the tank at the coal town of Río Turbio
- where gasoline is cheaper than in southernmost Chile - I made my way to El Calafate, where the
weather has turned summery. Meanwhile, I’ve written an op-ed on why Argentina’s
government should eliminate the “reciprocity fee” – urgently and unilaterally –
that’s due to published in the Buenos
Aires Herald. Whenever that happens, I’ll post links here, and on my Facebook
and Twitter accounts.

Friday, December 25, 2015

Across from Puerto Natales, on Seno Última
Esperanza (“Last Hope Sound”), some of the mountainsides are still showing
snow in early summer, but it’s been raining most of the day and the grass here
is green – reminding me, on the most tedious day of the year, of Stan Freberg’s classic
comedy spot "Green Chri$tma$." Recently everyone’s been talking about money in Argentina – most notably the end
of the “currency clamp” – so let’s talk about Chile instead.

When I arrived
in Natales late last February, the Chilean peso was at 618 per US dollar; a year
earlier it had been at 558 per dollar. Today, though, with demand for Chilean
copper slowing, the dollar is now worth nearly 700 pesos and prices are falling
accordingly.

One obvious item is that, in a country with some of the continent’s
most expensive gasoline – in past years, I’ve paid well over US$6 per gallon
(US$1.58 per liter) in some locations – it’s now as low as US$3.70 per gallon
(US$0.98 per liter). Contrast the photo above, from Puerto Puyuhuapi in February of 2014, with the one below, taken a few days ago in Punta Arenas.

With low inflation, and no need to change surreptitiously
as has been the case in Argentina, Chile is definitely more affordable at
present. One thing has
changed for the worse, though. In the past, I’ve always recommended using the
ATMs at BancoEstado,
the state-run bank that had not imposed a charge on foreign currency
transactions. When I arrived in Santiago
last month, though, I was surprised to learn that their ATMs would now collect
a 4000-peso (US$5.72 at present) fee for each withdrawal. That’s still lower
than other Chilean banks, which charge up to 6000 pesos (US$8.58) per
withdrawal.

In cases like
this, it pays to withdraw relatively large amounts, so today I withdrew 200,000
pesos (US$285.95) at a branch here – that’s generally the largest allowed
per transaction. Withdrawing smaller amounts with greater frequency is,
obviously, far more costly.

That said, I did
note what I hope may be a pleasant surprise. Chilean ATMs ask your approval
before collecting the fee, giving you the option to cancel the transaction.
Today’s did not, though, so perhaps they never reprogrammed the machines here
and I got off cheap. I can only hope.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

For visitors to Patagonia, whisky (whiskey, if you
prefer) is probably not the first thing that comes to mind, but in southernmost
Chile it’s become something of
a tradition on excursions and cruises. I’m not much of a whisky drinker – my entire
lifetime consumption probably amounts to less than a fifth – but I always look
forward to it here.

Recently, it’s
happened twice. Just a few days ago I took a two-night, one-day whale-watching
trip to the western Strait of Magellan on the M/V Forrest (pictured above), which formerly hauled wool and supplies around the
Falkland Islands
before being reconditioned as a compact cruise vessel – bunks rather than beds
- in Chile. Part of the itinerary involved a Zodiac landing on Isla Santa Inés,
where we could take a short hike to the base of a glacier and, on the way back,
the guides fetched a floating block of ice that, with the help of a small ice ax,
became whisky on the rocks when we returned to the ship.

A word on
language, when the topic of glacial ice comes up: Many native Spanish-speaking guides
use the false cognate “millenary” to describe ancient glacial ice. In reality,
this has nothing to do with women’s headwear (millenery), but rather
derives from the Spanish milenario, meaning
a thousand years old. This is an understandable mistake, but one that always sounds
awkward to me.

The measure is
long overdue, and will benefit visitors even if the weaker peso does contribute
to short-term inflation (this is still unclear, since the peso has actually
gained slightly against the former blue dollar since the change). Two weeks
ago, on December 4th, the last place I changed US dollars for Argentine pesos
was the cueva (cave) pictured above
in the lakes district resort of San Carlos de Bariloche, where I had
to make an appointment by phone and then be admitted through the reinforced
door, where an employee in a barred booth counted out my pesos.

The end of the
clamp means that tourists will no longer have to seek out potentially shady
money-changers in Buenos Aires or elsewhere, since they
will now be able to withdraw money from ATMs without paying, in effect, a 30
percent penalty on every purchase (though they will have to pay charge on each
ATM transaction; minimize this by withdrawing larger amounts). This should be a
relief to everybody except the previous government of President Cristina Fernández de
Kirchner, whose financial house of cards has collapsed.

There remains
one other major task that should make everybody's daily transactions easier.
The government of newly elected President Mauricio Macri should create larger banknotes, ideally of 200 and 500
pesos, that will not test the carrying capacity of ordinary wallets and even
armored cars - the reams of 100-peso notes (worth about US$7 each) are still a
logistical nightmare.

Monday, December 14, 2015

Recently, a
young Chilean woman told me she moved to Tierra del Fuego
because its clear nighttime skies offered spectacular views of the stars. It
struck me, later, that there’s more than one way to interpret what she said.

Divided between Argentina and Chile, Tierra del Fuego is a large
but thinly populated archipelago with an international reputation but only a
handful of cities and towns. For most foreign visitors on a Patagonia vacation, the prime
destination is Argentina’s Beagle Channel port of Ushuaia, the gateway to Antarctica, usually reached
by air or cruise ship. For overland travelers, though, the tiny town of Tolhuin, where the land begins
to rise midway between the industrial flatlands city of Río
Grande and Ushuaia’s scenic sierras, the bakery known as Panadería La Unión has become an
obligatory stopover.

In fact, all the
buses that travel between Ushuaia and the Chilean city of Punta Arenas, on the
South American mainland, stop here so that passengers can load up on medialunas (Argentina’s version of the
French croissant) and other pastries, plus empanadas and chocolates for a 12-hour
trip that involves a ferry crossing over the Strait of Magellan
(there are no longer any flights between Ushuaia and Punta Arenas). So does
almost every Argentine motorist en route to “the uttermost part of the earth”
(to appropriate the title of pioneer Lucas Bridges’s memoir
of his life on the island).

Many of them stop
in hopes of glimpsing the Argentine and even foreign celebrities whose
photographs cover the walls. Among them are the (now disgraced) President Carlos Menem (pictured above), the Dylanesque folk-rock singer León
Greco (pictured below at left; his signature album “De Ushuaia a La Quiaca” spanned the length of
the country) and even the US rock drummer Marky Ramone (pictured at bottom; the Ramones
were enormously popular in Argentina). In a town that takes its name from an
indigenous word meaning the “heart” of the island, there’s also a tribute to the
late Buenos Aires surgeon René
Favaloro, who pioneered coronary bypass surgery while working in the United
States.

However
quintessentially Argentine La Unión may be, it has one surprising shortcoming.
In a country where almost every remote town offers fresh espresso on the spot, the
“bakery to the stars” offers only a coin-operated vending machine to purchase
coffee.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Early last year,
while driving Chile’s Carretera
Austral, I photographed this bumper sticker – plastered onto the back side
of a highway sign – denigrating environmental
philanthropist Douglas Tompkins in hopes that he would get out of Patagonia, where he helped
create new protected areas in Argentina
as well. While small, strong opposition to Tompkins came from local and even
national government officials, and even some paranoid nationalists who even imagined
that he was a Zionist.

On Tuesday, before hearing of Tompkins’s death, I paid a
brief visit to Argentina’s Parque
Nacional Monte León, on the Atlantic Coast of Santa Cruz
province. This was another Tompkins/McDivitt project, created by purchasing
the Estancia Monte León sheep farm from its owner Silvia Braun (pictured below with her husband, Juan Kuriger).

Silvia belonged to the Braun-Menéndez wool-growing dynasty
but, in my contacts with her, she was something of a free spirit. While
donating the park to the Argentine government, the Tompkinses retained a small
section that includes the former big house as what is now Hostería Monte León.
There, Silvia was contented to tend her organic garden as a Tompkins
employee, so long as it let her remain in a place she loved – living in the
simple trailer pictured here.

Sadly, the same
day that Doug Tompkins died, I learned from Silvia’s husband that she had also
died several months ago. While I didn’t know her really well, I always looked
forward to seeing her at Monte León, where “Patagonia without Silvia” will be
as much an oxymoron as “Patagonia without Tompkins.”

With over 30 years living and traveling in Latin America, I write guidebooks to the "Southern Cone" countries - so called because of their shape on the map - of Chile and Argentina. I'm especially interested in the remote, scenic Patagonian region overlapping the two countries. I'm sole author of Moon Handbooks to Chile & Easter Island and to Patagonia, including the Falkland Islands. I've also authored the National Geographic Traveler guide to Argentina, and DK Eyewitness Guides to Argentina and Chile.
I have a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and have done research in Peru, Chile, Argentina and the Falklands, where I spent a year as a Fulbright-Hays scholar.
My home base is Oakland, California, but I spend five months a year in South America. I often stay in Buenos Aires, where my Argentine wife and I have an apartment in the barrio of Palermo.
I speak fluent Spanish, less fluent German, serviceable Portuguese and desperation French.
Any questions, please contact me at southerncone (at) mac.com, or leave comments by clicking on the word "comment" at the bottom of each entry. Comments are moderated, but I get to them quickly.